A neck, positioned and fixed with the help of wires, needles, clamps, and foam blocks. Photo: Vincent Fournier

From a German border town on the banks of the river Neisse, the anatomist Gunther von Hagens commands a fortress of death. The former textile mill has glorious skylights and a facade of dark red brick, but inside it’s faded and forlorn. A spray of Allied bullets left dents in the metalwork, and grenade blasts have chipped the masonry. The end of World War II split the town of Guben right down its gut like a miniature Berlin, a wound from which it never quite recovered, and von Hagens’ palace seems to have suffered from its own, more private reconfiguration: Dormant forklifts dot the courtyard next to bits of fencing and piled rebar; water drips from 20-foot ceilings in the dormitories; floral wallpaper sags off yellowed plaster.

This wilted splendor gives way, in places, to the fundamental work of von Hagens’ business—the extraction of body parts and sale of preserved remains. A few years ago, he spent $50 million to turn this run-down site into a global headquarters for his Body Worlds exhibits, fitted out with tanks of acetone (for defatting tissue), high tech freezers, and a morgue. In one corner of the yard, a refrigerated warehouse holds a band saw big enough to rip an elephant in half. In another, the carcass of a giraffe lies at the bottom of a swimming pool, its spots turned pale in a solution of ethanol and water. The animal’s tail is tucked between its legs, and its neck lies along the pool’s diagonal—the only way it fits. The giraffe is being kept pliable for dissection. But it could just as soon have been frozen whole and sliced into millimeter-thick sheets. Preserved with plastic, these could end up in lecture halls or museum displays, or added to an archive in the rooms upstairs, where parts of animals and people are kept in bins marked brain and foot and scrotum.

The 68-year-old scientist who runs this factory of desiccation and dissection spends his days shuffling through its corridors with his lapdog, Bella. They are often the only living things in sight, and Bella’s yaps echo among the carved-up corpses that line the halls in obscene and fabulous poses. One looks like a flayed Harry Potter, riding on a twisted broomstick that is, upon closer examination, his own spinal cord. Another sits with a rod in hand, dangling a fish, while his body has been exploded into parts that hang from a rack on fishing lines. There are horse heads too, their flesh corroded to reveal clouds of blood vessels, and yaks and pigs with their ribs spread out like wings. Von Hagens calls the place his Plastinarium. It’s the first permanent display of specimens from his stupendously successful traveling exhibition of flesh preserved with plastic. Body Worlds has made its way to London, Tokyo, Istanbul, Boston, and scores of other cities since the 1990s; it has inspired copycats and lawsuits and sold more than 35 million tickets.

As a young lecturer at the University of Heidelberg in 1977, von Hagens developed a laboratory trick that at first seemed of interest only to a dwindling cadre of macroscopic anatomists: a way to impregnate slices of kidney tissue with plastic. Soon he’d made the process work for whole dissected bodies. He starts with regular embalming—the injection of formaldehyde into femoral arteries—and then submerges the body in acetone, which dissolves its fat and water. After that he drops the corpse into a basin filled with liquid polymer. It’s placed inside a vacuum chamber, where the acetone bubbles off as plastic pushes in to take its place.

It took years to get the details right, but eventually von Hagens figured out a way to turn his method into a morbid empire, devoted to the processing of animal and human cadavers, with outposts in Kyrgyzstan and China. At its busiest, the complex in Guben employed 220 people and churned out specimens for exhibition, along with those that could be sold to medical schools around the world—limbs and joints for orthopedics, jaws for dentistry, spinal columns for neurology, and $75,000 plastic-filled corpses for gross anatomy.

But on the morning of December 29, 2010, the anatomist, inventor, and entrepreneur stood at the center of his factory, before his army of employees, and began to cry. The business that he’d worked so hard to build was crumbling. Revenue from Body Worlds had begun to taper off, and sales of body parts to universities had always been propped up by the exhibits. His plastination plant in China was nearly defunct, and his would-be partnership in Siberia had ended in a scandal. Here in Guben, the operation had gotten to the verge of bankruptcy. The staff would have to be cut back, von Hagens said; two-thirds of his employees would be let go.

The doctor too was in decline. “My hand trembles, my language is vague,” he stammered. Two years before, he’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and the symptoms had grown so intense, so rapidly, that he could no longer keep them secret. There is no cure for his disorder, no way to prevent his brain from shrinking. With each passing month, von Hagens’ limbs will get more rigid and his face more like a mask. After a career spent staving off rot and giving life to stiffened corpses, the man the tabloids call “Dr. Death” faces his own.

Photo: Vincent Fournier

Many people expire without a warning; others learn they have just days or weeks to live. Von Hagens’ end has been forecast at least three times already, going back to when he was a boy in Greiz. Growing up the middle of five children in the midsize East German town, he learned in grade school that he had a dangerous bleeding disorder. (“I felt sorry for my parents,” he recalls.) The bleeding put him in the hospital on more than one occasion, but now he keeps it in check by eating peanuts, which have a coagulant effect. Even so, it seems a major pitfall for a professional dissector who works with sharp tools, and I can’t help but worry when von Hagens emerges from his suite of rooms in Guben on the morning of my visit. He’s got a fresh and sloppy shave, with scarlet nicks across his chin.

It’s been nearly six months since he gave his good-bye speech, and the Parkinson’s has left his face both slack and stiff: He has a drooping jaw and arching eyebrows, as if frozen in a moment of profound dismay. Once an enthusiastic and fluid talker, von Hagens now has trouble finishing a sentence. His illness comes in waves that start at his fingertips and work their way up to his throat, until they churn his words in a quicksand of slurs and stutters. “I hope for a successful therapy for Parkinson’s!” he bellows at one point, and then explains it’s easiest for him to speak in sudden outbursts. “Don’t be afraid!” he shouts.

We amble through the Plastinarium, though it would seem more apropos to creep around the place at night like Scooby-Doo, tiptoeing past the potted ficus trees—also plastic, it turns out—and the ropes of human jerky. When von Hagens was in his twenties, he explains, his death was foretold again. This time a doctor colleague gave the sentence: He had an unusual condition that could reduce the flow of blood through his aorta and kill him off before the age of 45. As a connoisseur of body parts, von Hagens knew that the heart is poorly engineered—the layout of the coronary arteries leaves it prone to blockage. The timescale of this second diagnosis was long enough that he could ignore it. (It turned out his colleague had been mistaken.)

As we make our way through the anatomical museum, von Hagens lists some other body parts that are not so well designed. There are major problems with the penis—the prostate gland should not be wrapped so tight around the urethra—and he has a lot to say on the weakness of the knee. But von Hagens doesn’t stint on praise for human evolution; he admires many of our features for their complexity and cleverness. Above all he loves the brain. Nothing, he says, is as perfectly constructed.

Now von Hagens’ brain is failing him. In 2008 he received his third, and final, mortal diagnosis—an illness of his mind this time, not of his heart; one bound to mangle up that perfect blueprint until it deprives him of his ability to walk and talk and eat and think. He knows his Parkinson’s cannot be wished away or cured by eating peanuts. “I am a doctor,” he told his friend Stephan Rathgeb, once his director of communications. “I give myself seven more years.”

He’s more sanguine now: With therapy, the doctor hopes to live as long as most people. (He used to say he’d make it to 100.) And the illness hasn’t sapped his drive to cut up corpses. Though he tires easily and his hands have grown too shaky for a scalpel, von Hagens still makes his rounds through the Plastinarium in his trademark zippered vest and black hat, looking over assistants’ shoulders and spitting out instructions.

In the body-positioning room, he circles around a female corpse with dyed brown hair. Though the skinless specimens on display can look like plastic toys, this one—still somewhat fresh—looks like someone’s aunt or sister. She has a scowl on her face, three piercings in her ear, a roll of belly fat, and one inverted nipple. Von Hagens checks her skin for flaws. Every few minutes, an assistant mists the body with a water bottle so it won’t dry out.

Two or three corpses arrive in Guben every week—all come from willing donors—and this is where they’re arranged and posed, while some are frozen solid at minus-94 degrees Fahrenheit for passing through the band saw. There’s a human leg on a rack with the genitals still attached, as if a man’s lower half had been split like a wishbone. Next to that, a set of hard-edged blocks that look like cubes of fatty cold cut or chunks of schweinebraten. They’re one of von Hagens’ new inventions: a teaching tool for medical students—when stacked together on matching faces, the puzzle pieces form a human pelvis.

The obese woman will be cut in horizontal sections, he declares. A red laser line shows von Hagens’ assistants where to place the blade. Watching him at work invites a simple question, one so obvious and yet so personal that at first it’s difficult to ask. What will happen when the Parkinson’s has run its course? Will von Hagens end up on this table, his tissues pickled in formaldehyde, with metal pins stuck into his face and his feet propped up on blocks of foam? Will someone do to him exactly what he’s done to her, and to so many others?

When Dr. Death is dead, what will happen to his remains?

Von Hagens’ hands have grown too shaky to use a scalpel, but he still oversees his assistants, like this one dissecting a nasal cavity.Photo: Vincent Fournier

Dead and dying bodies have, in recent times, been discreetly erased from sight. “The natural processes of corruption and decay have become disgusting,” wrote the aptly named British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer in his 1955 essay “The Pornography of Death.” In the 1800s, he said, children and adults alike were routinely confronted with mortality—dead relatives were washed and laid out at home, funerals were extravagant, novelists were preoccupied with deathbed scenes of melancholy. Now such encounters are rare and our experience of death—our engagement with it as a fact and force of nature—has been replaced by a kind of prudery, a sense that expiration is as lewd as sex. “If we dislike the modern pornography of death,” Gorer wrote, referring to the gangster movies and horror comics of his time, “then we must give back to death—natural death—its parade and publicity.”

In von Hagens’ Plastinarium, where dissected heads hang shameless from the walls, Gorer’s plea has finally been granted. However else one might describe the Body Worlds exhibits—as science or as flimflam—they have done more than any other modern spectacle to bring the human corpse into view. For the first time in recent memory, tens of millions of people in the developed world have had the chance to see cadavers on parade, to view the lifeless bodies of their fellow beings without the intermediation of fear or shame.

As the architect of this experience, and as its tireless proponent, von Hagens has refigured death for modern sensibilities. A plastinated corpse isn’t pickled, like a body in a casket. It doesn’t stink, like cadavers at the morgue. It doesn’t rot or bloat or molder. To see one doesn’t make you sad or sick; it doesn’t fill you with anxiety. The experience is something else instead—an encounter with a memento mori that’s both dry and durable and can be split and peeled without disgust. It’s death denuded of its most gruesome elements, the body as a finely engineered machine.

When von Hagens shipped his first sturdy specimens to Tokyo in September 1995, he tapped into a form of entertainment that had been dormant for a century. In the 1800s, expositions of anatomy were commonplace in the red-light districts of Europe and America. These were galleries of the grotesque, showing waxen models of dissected, naked women, dismembered genitalia, and casts of skin disease or venereal infection. The popular display of body parts—real and fake—arrived in the US in the 1840s and had largely faded out by the 1920s.

From there the anatomical museum, and the lineage that takes us up to Guben, was cleansed of its more salacious trappings and subsumed into the upright field of public health. In 1930, the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden displayed its Glass Man—a Bauhaus-inspired life-size figurine with plastic skin, metal bones, and painted wire for its veins and arteries. Pared down to this perfect form, the Glass Man was the iPod of anatomy: an elegant, reproducible commodity that could be shipped around the world. (In the years that followed, the original and its copies turned up in Buffalo, Chicago, and St. Louis, as well as Stockholm, Sweden, and Nagoya, Japan.) As a symbol of eugenics, it would later stand for Nazi racial pride.

By the time the Glass Men marched across the continents, the public display of authentic bodies had all but disappeared. The parade and publicity of death, as Gorer called it, would not be back until von Hagens’ first show in Tokyo in 1995—half a million people came to see it.

Von Hagens’ plastinates tapped into a latent fascination with corporeality. Centuries of funeral rituals—burning, burying, mummifying, feeding corpses to vultures—attest to our need to take control of death and represent it for the living. Von Hagens rendered this ancient practice in a modern form. Plastination brought death into the light and gave it an aesthetic perfect for our scientific age.

Poking at a piece of tissue, von Hagens seems less a doctor than a master plumber or mechanic, each corpse a set of tubes that must be filled with fluids of the right viscosity. In the early years, when the plastination experiments grew too unwieldy for his lab in Heidelberg, he rented space in a garage. The cluttered workshop is his natural habitat: He’s most at home among barrels of chemicals and boxes of stray parts. Among his first tools was a deli meat slicer for cutting human kidneys into even slabs. Later he stretched bits of panty hose to strain out blood clots and plopped brains into pudding molds so they wouldn’t get malformed.

Von Hagens lives his life the way he works, without regard for custom or pretense and with a tendency to view his own body in mechanistic, unsentimental terms. To watch him eat is to see a man refuel a vehicle: He’s made a habit of going for days on little more than a bowl of berries or a quart of milk, and when dining out he likes to order whichever dish will come out quickest. Each of his essential life functions has been assigned a place in the spartan four-room factory suite where he lives alone, despite being married for 20 years. There’s a bed at one end, a small area with exercise equipment in the middle, and then an office with a dine-in kitchen that’s stocked with instant soup and crystallized coffee. A large institutional clock hangs from the wall. “The body is like a car or an engine,” he says. “You have to rest it, you have to move it, and you have to feed it.”

Years ago, von Hagens overhauled his life. He tried to flee from East Germany while in his early twenties but was captured by the Stasi and imprisoned for two years. After making it to West Germany in 1970, he married a woman named Cornelia von Hagens and chose to appropriate her noble-sounding name. (His given name is Liebchen.) They had three children but the marriage soured when von Hagens’ experiments with plastination drove the family into debt, and it fell apart when he started seeing someone else—a young woman in his dissection seminar named Andrea Whalley. He and Cornelia divorced, and von Hagen married Whalley three years later, in 1992. At his request, his new wife changed her name to Angelina.

With Angelina’s help, von Hagens set out to build his empire. At times he was motivated by a simple need to outdo himself, spending $4 million and 65,000 hours of employee time—and building a warehouse-sized freezer—just to plastinate an elephant. That impulse hasn’t faded with his health and business fortunes: Now he says he’d like to do the carcass of a blue whale, and then he’ll make the body of a dinosaur from parts of other animals.

In the meantime, those around him do the best they can to manage his expectations. In May of 2012 his son Rurik began managing the company in Guben. Now 32 and a graduate of business school, he’s the one who shut down the facility in China and helped orchestrate the layoffs at the Plastinarium. It also falls to him to tell his dad what can and can’t be accomplished. Though Rurik wears his hair slicked back and has a B-school tendency to wink while making a point, he can sound like a kid who only just discovered that his father is not a superhero. “For all his life he liked to have a certain degree of stress, because that’s what kept him running and gave him ideas,” Rurik says. By all accounts, von Hagens spent almost every waking hour in the lab, and in spare moments he would study foreign languages on flash cards or take power naps while sitting at his desk. “That really doesn’t work anymore,” Rurik says. “But that is how he lived for decades.”

Stephan Rathgeb, the former communications director, agrees. “All his life was about efficiency, and then suddenly he is not efficient anymore, I mean, this is his weakest point. This is his personal Chernobyl.”

The bone station in the Plastinarium’s learning workshop, where the 22 pieces of the skull are separated then reconnected with steel wire, leaving gaps to allow a 3-D view of each component. Photo: Vincent Fournier

There was a time when the prospect of von Hagens’ own dehydration and defatting was among his favorite topics. “We discussed it, even many years ago,” Angelina tells me while her husband takes a nap inside his modest suite. She is often on the road but has come to Guben to cohost my visit. “He’s about 15 years older than I am, and statistically women live longer than men, so he said, ‘You know, you’re a lot younger than me … and I would want you to plastinate me.'”

“I felt shocked,” she continues, “and I said, ‘No, I never can.’ But he insisted, and we sometimes talked about it. He calmed me down: ‘You wouldn’t have to do it immediately—you could put me in the freezer, but not more than one year because then I’d get those freezer burns.'”

Angelina has taken on the role of company spokesperson since soon after her husband got sick, and she prepares her thoughts behind pursed lips and eyelashes battered with mascara. Whenever they are in the same room, Angelina watches over her husband from a kind of lupine crouch, bounding in when his voice begins to falter or when he starts to stray off message. He’ll fumble with a thought, and she’ll fill the silence with a sound bite, one of many predigested phrases from his past: The more you think about death, the more normal it becomes. Or: Life is the exception. Or: Everyone dies a double death—a death of your soul and a death of your body. Then he’ll turn to me with resignation in his eyes—a sheepish, doleful look—and nod: “My opinions are identical with hers.”

Yet these days, on the matter of his death and plastination, von Hagens and his wife disagree. He no longer comforts her with talk of the freezer, and she’s not at all resigned to carry out his final wishes. The squabble reemerges when the three of us are touring through his private workshop—a brick-floored space that serves as a makeshift gallery for his latest work. Here’s where he keeps his silver-plated cow heart; a table made from giraffe legs wearing glitzy, high-heeled shoes; and skinny slices of a bookshelf, a piano, and a motorcycle.

Von Hagens wants to be slivered into sections too. That way his body can be displayed in different places at the same time. (At one point, he’d planned to plastinate his father and pose the corpse as a patient on a table, then later have his corpse posed beside it, as if at work. But his father is still healthy at 96, tending to his garden and raising chickens.) Angelina, for her part, would rather keep him as a plastinated whole. But when asked, neither dares to make a final judgment. Von Hagens answers first: “My opinion is … she decides.”

“And I’ve postponed these thoughts,” she says in turn. “It’s very difficult. I don’t know.”

Von Hagens peers at her from beneath his leather hat and tries to speak again, but his mouth can only mumble. At last he finds the strength to force out: “It’s a strange subject!”

As we near the end of our tour, Bella the dog scampers ahead and across the courtyard to a room where the ceiling is partially caved in and plants, real ones, grow through a pile of rotting timbers. Then she circles back to von Hagens and sniffs around his ankles, as she does for most hours of the day. When we’re eating lunch, Bella sits on his lap beneath the table. When she gets excited or upset—at the sight of a plastinated baby chick, or a bucket full of bones—he scoops her up and murmurs into her ears. When she’s cold at night, he warms her under his pillow.

“She is easy to hold, you know,” he says when we get back into his office and the dog has settled in his lap. His voice grows weak—from disease or emotion, it’s hard to tell. He’s been talking coolly about what it means to die and what might happen to his corpse, but it’s the topic of his dog that chokes him up. “She can always sit beside me,” he sputters, and then pinches the bridge of his nose between his fingers and begins to weep. We sit in silence while his shoulders shake.

For von Hagens, grief and sorrow are no different from any other defect of the human body that should be amenable to fixing. When his tears subside, he blames them on his disease—a condition I later learn is called pseudobulbar affect, or the involuntary and inappropriate expression of feeling. It was even worse a few years ago, he tells me, before he started treatment: “I was very upset at my uncontrolled emotions. I could not even go to the cinema.” He takes off his hat and shows the lumps on his scalp where the leads from brain-stimulating electrodes have irritated the skin. It’s the only time I’ve seen his naked head. He says that he’s been better since the treatment. “Just now is the first time for the last week that I cried. So I’m nearly normal now.”

Earlier, von Hagens had revealed another of his works in progress, a gruesome scene he calls “Headless Into Death.” So far it consists of a smashed-up, ’80s-model Volkswagen with a dirty American flag spread across the seat. The car belonged to a Body Worlds donor. When his wife, another donor, succumbed to cancer, the owner of the car committed suicide by driving headlong into a tree.

Von Hagens sawed the vehicle in half, and now he plans to put a section of the driver’s headless body in the front seat. The dead wife has already been processed here in Guben, he says. He wants to stand her off to one side, waiting for her husband as a full-body plastinate in silicone. As he explains the scene, it sounds as if he’s playing out a fantasy with dolls, a diorama of how he might like to die himself, revving till the very end—not puttering with Parkinson’s.

Whatever he decides for this unlucky pair, one thing is clear: They won’t have a chance to argue, nor will their next of kin. Donors to the plastination program sign away their right to say how their bodies might be posed. (The consent form does ask if they agree to be “exhibited in public” or “interpreted as anatomical works of art,” but it also says their answers to these questions are “recommendations rather than binding terms.”) Von Hagens can arrange his corpses in a mock coitus or cast a mold of them to make an ersatz Jesus Christ—both of these are on display in Guben—or he can carve them up and ship the parts for use in classrooms. He can do with them exactly as he pleases.

Many have been willing to supply their flesh. The business staffs a body hotline and the deceased save the cost of interment or cremation. The deal is so appealing, in fact, that the donor database is overflowing. Angelina says they’ve had to make a waiting list for would-be plastinates. She also tells me that of the people who have enrolled, just one in 10 gives ideas for how they’d like their bodies shown. The rest are OK, or even eager, to leave their fate in von Hagens’ hands.

Perhaps they feel the standard rituals of death are not for them. They’ve chosen to be anointed with acetone and polymer and sliced for public view instead. Administering this strange, newfangled rite has been von Hagens’ task for almost 30 years, and he has lived his life the way he treats his bodies—as something manufactured that can be tinkered with to suit his needs. But since his diagnosis, that control has slipped away. This may be the doctor’s final lesson: When he dies, he will be plastinated—that much is certain—but the posing of his body will not be up to him. For once, he’ll leave the mastery of life and death to someone else.

“Understanding how the world works is a gift for me,” he says, holding Bella in his arms. There’s something more he wants to say, but he’s having trouble speaking. “When I cannot talk anymore, a red light goes on,” he mumbles at last. “I think that it goes on now. The red light goes on now.”

Daniel Engber (@danengber) writes about science and culture and is a columnist for Slate.